Do You Have a Designated Agent to Handle Copyright Infringement Claims?

This past Tuesday, legal experts Tom Curley and Chad Bowman spoke to Subscription Site Insider members about end-user license agreements and protecting paid content.

This past Tuesday, legal experts Tom Curley and Chad Bowman spoke to Subscription Site Insider members about end-user license agreements and protecting paid content.It was an informative Webinar, and one that helped subscription site executives double-check that all their legal Ts were crossed.For example, did you know that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a website can have limitations on liability for copyrighted material posted by others  if the website has designated an agent to receive notifications of copyright infringement? All you have to do is provide the said agent’s contact information to the Copyright Office and post the information on your website.To do so, go to http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp and download and fill out the PDF form to designate an agent.During the Webinar, Curley and Bowman recommended that you name a specific person and give an exact email address — not a generic one, like [email protected]. They cited a previous case where AOL had designated an agent, but then changed the email address for take-down notices without forwarding emails to the new address – thus “allow[ing] notices of potential copyright infringement to fall into a vacuum and to go unheeded.”  A court then said that a jury had to decide whether AOL had done its due diligence by ensuring that DMCA notices were received.Bowman and Curley also spoke about best practices for creating legally-binding end-user license agreements. For example, getting an IP address and time stamp for account activation is best, but as many of our listeners noted, that may be technically difficult. So Bowman and Curley said a second-best practice would be to have an email link that subscribers must click to “activate” their account — just make sure the email states that “by clicking on this link, you [the subscriber] agree to adhere by our terms of use.”For more specific tips on creating end-user license agreements and staying in compliance with copyright law, check out the Instant Replay of Curley and Bowman’s Webinar on Subscription Site Insider.

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